Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer networks and, more particularly, to efficiently storing data in a storage system.
Description of the Related Art
As computer memory storage and data bandwidth increase, so does the amount and complexity of data that businesses daily manage. A distributed storage system may be coupled to client computers interconnected by one or more networks. If any portion of the distributed storage system has poor performance, company operations may be impaired. A distributed storage system therefore maintains high standards for data availability and high-performance functionality.
The distributed storage system comprises physical volumes, which may be solid-state devices or partitions of a storage device. Software applications, such as a logical volume manager or a disk array manager, provide a means of allocating space on mass-storage arrays. In addition, this software allows a system administrator to create units of storage groups including logical volumes. Storage virtualization provides an abstraction (separation) of logical storage from physical storage in order to access logical storage without end-users identifying physical storage.
To support storage virtualization, a volume manager performs input/output (I/O) redirection by translating incoming I/O requests using logical addresses from end-users into new requests using addresses associated with physical locations in the storage devices. As some storage devices may include additional address translation mechanisms, such as address translation layers that may be used in solid-state storage devices, the translation from a logical address to another address mentioned above may not represent the only or final address translation. Redirection utilizes metadata stored in one or more mapping tables. In addition, information stored in one or more mapping tables may be used for storage deduplication and mapping virtual sectors at a specific snapshot level to physical locations. As the amount of data to maintain in a storage system grows, the cost of storing the data likewise grows.
In view of the above, systems and methods for efficiently storing data in a storage system are desired.